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While writing my ’90s blog, Gator Golf, I tried to use as many types of social media (that I actively used, at least) as possible. By doing this, I think I definitely had a higher readership than I would have without it.

I actually wrote my blog entries through the Independent Florida Alligator. I decided to blog for the paper this semester, and when I found out that it could tie in with my editing topic blog, it worked out really well. One of the pluses of blogging for the Alligator was having an editor look over my entries. Jillian was great to work with, and she would modify the headlines I wrote, which was great for SEO, and used tags that would most likely turn up in search engines. She did a lot of that work for me. In addition, the Alligator blog site had a share button through which I could immediately link to my blog through many types of social media.

Through the share button, I initially used Facebook. That is the social network I use most frequently, so I figured that would be the easiest way to promote my blog among my friends. I would always post the link with a one-sentence description, followed by a “read my blog” sentence. Many friends of mine would “like” the posts and then comment on whatever I wrote about, from Power Rangers to Furbys. I felt great that my blog created discussion.

I also heavily promoted my blog through Twitter. (Here is a Storify I created of my various promotion tweets throughout the semester.) With the Alligator’s “share” button, I was allowed to use a “bit.ly” link, which also allows you to track how many people view your link (however, I never did get to sign up for bit.ly and use this feature). A few of my followers would tweet back to me.

Another great thing about having an editor at the Alligator was that she would email us bloggers every week with our stats. Because of the Alligator’s advanced technology, I had at least 100, sometimes over 400, views per week. Many of these were total strangers, which was awesome.

I didn’t promote my actual WordPress blog that I made for this course, since I mainly wrote through the Alligator blog. However, I did end up making a Tumblr of my blog as well, and through my use of search-friendly tags like “’90s nostalgia,” “childhood” and “toys,” I had readers liking and reblogging many of my posts. Tumblr users could track tags included on my blog also.

Overall, my use of social media to promote my blog worked out well for me. If I continue blogging on ’90s nostalgia, I will keep using these methods and maybe even move on to other networks, including Delicious and LinkedIn.